![]() At the end of the tour, bands would be talking about this one funky joint in Austin instead of empty municipal arenas and other places that they'd play. To them, it was a feather in their cap because people thought better of them for it. Since they were doing several dates, a number of times they'd put people in the Armadillo who couldn't make any money and sell it out wall-to-wall and maybe break even. Those guys learned early on that they could make friends with an entertainer by talking him into playing the Armadillo. 'It's Hard To Be a Saint in the City'Įddie Wilson, owner, Armadillo/Threadgill's: We'd been doing a number of Armadillo shows with Wild West Productions out of Houston. The Chronicle met with a handful of attendees and those behind the scenes, combing through foggy memories to sort out what happened that weekend. Both shows are remembered here today as the stuff of legend only the likes of Bruce Springsteen could create, concerts people still talk about 40 years later. The radio segment, an eight-song set bookended by a seven-minute interview, helped Springsteen conquer his first Southern city.įive days later, on March 15, he arrived in Austin for a two-night stand at the Armadillo World Headquarters, which was razed in 1981. You play to the band because no one else is there."īut the Bayou City was hip to Springsteen, largely because Appel had sent KLOL a demo of "The Fever," which had gotten play around town. ![]() "So you go down there and you play this big place, and you turn your microphone on and you face the band. In Nashville, people at that particular branch of the record company were like, 'Zzzzzz,' so the FM station didn't even know there was a second album out. We just did Atlanta, and we just did Nashville, and it was really zero. ![]() On KLOL-FM, after the first of four nights at Houston's Liberty Hall, Springsteen said: "It's hard. Springsteen addressed his Southern plight when he arrived in Texas in March 1974. A day later, Springsteen asked for Lopez's resignation and the band was forced to cancel the rest of its regional run. Nearly a year later, before a February concert at the University of Kentucky supporting second album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, band manager Mike Appel got into an argument with drummer Vini Lopez. His voice is undistinguished, though it cannot be ignored in his songs, and his guitar playing is somewhere to the left of center of a bell curve." Thin and pale and dressed in black, he looks like a parody of early Bob Dylan. In Fayetteville, N.C., there was a show supporting Chicago that he'd later describe as "a soul-destroying experience." Richmond, Va., followed, where Barbara Green for The News Leader wrote: "Bruce Springsteen is a curious performer. The South hadn't been kind to Bruce Springsteen.Īn April 1973 gig opening for the Beach Boys in Atlanta sold 3,000 tickets in a room big enough for 16,000. The truth is, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock & roll.The Boss backstage at the 'Dillo, 1974 (Photo by Burton Wilson) He would later make different albums, but he never made a better one. And the album's songs contain the best realization of Springsteen's poetic vision, which soon enough would be tarnished by disillusionment. Lopez's busy Keith Moon style is appropriate to the arrangements in a way his replacement, Max Weinberg, never could have been. Following the personnel changes in the E Street Band in 1974, there is a conventional wisdom that this album is marred by production lapses and performance problems, specifically the drumming of Vini Lopez. Musically and lyrically, Springsteen had brought an unruly muse under control and used it to make a mature statement that synthesized popular musical styles into complicated, well-executed arrangements and absorbing suites it evoked a world precisely even as that world seemed to disappear. The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless piece of music. Though Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was moving on. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup group its name. Bruce Springsteen expanded the folk-rock approach of his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., to strains of jazz, among other styles, on its ambitious follow-up, released only eight months later.
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